colossus
by The Peace
Summary: Six months is a long time. Cosima tells herself this, a lot, when emotions interrupts her logic and reminds her that there's something more at stake here than not having the answers.


Written quickly at 4 AM and unbeta'd because I wanted to upload it before all of it, I'm sure, is jossed by tonight's episode. Six months is just from a comment I read that seemed to make sense to me, but is complete fanon.

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**colossus**

Six months is a long time. Cosima tells herself this, a lot, when emotions interrupts her logic and reminds her that there's something more at stake here than not having the answers.

Because a lot can happen in six months, really. Cosima remembers well, the first six months after she'd moved out of her parents' house - she'd gotten a nose ring, cut off all her hair, grew it back out, broken up with her first girlfriend, switched majors twice (psych to chem to bio), gotten food poisoning (note: don't trust the burritos in Berkeley) -

Six months is a long time.

She counts out the days (182 days - 183 if she rounds, but Cosima prefers not to give herself any leeway), marks the last one on a calendar with a bright red X over the box. She's not being morbid - just practical. She does this with all her deadlines.

182 days is a long time. Cosima used to barely be able to wait seven for the weekend again when she was a kid. 182 days is six months is twenty-four weeks. It's almost an entire school year. If she _were_ in school, she'd practically have her PhD at the end of six months. So she has time.

Delphine raises her eyebrows, smiles without teeth when Cosima says this - maybe she's talking a little fast, she doesn't know. And then Delphine leans in and kisses her on the cheek and says, "We're going to figure it out, you know."

Delphine worries more - and less - than she needs to. It's a paradox, one Cosima isn't sure she wants. They _aren't_ the same, the clones - Cosima isn't Sarah isn't Alison isn't - wasn't - Beth wasn't Katja (God, how could they forget Katja? Sometimes her murder feels so insignificant, a footnote in the drama of Beth's suicide and the discovery of Sarah and Helena), and neither are any of them Jennifer Fitzsimmons, for all that it's the same face staring earnestly back at Cosima from the computer screen.

Six months ago, Cosima was still trying to figure out what it meant that Katja and Beth looked just like her (and then Alison had entered the picture, and - well, now Cosima knows what she'd look like if she had gone the soccer mom route, anyway). Six months ago they hadn't even met Sarah or discovered Helena. Really, if she can make that kind of progress again, she won't have just cured herself, she'll probably have figured out how to eradicate the disease and cure cancer, too. _Ha_.

Six months ago, there'd been three of them. Cosima had put a low estimate at that, or maybe five. Six months later, the file in her room is split down its spine from the weight of too many papers - and she'd abandoned it somewhere around the discovery of Rachel Duncan, because _ten_ viable clones, really?

Delphine worries that Cosima looks at Jennifer and sees herself, and Cosima's not going to deny that she never, ever really wanted to know exactly what her corpse would look like. But Delphine _doesn't _worry that Jennifer died alone, because Cosima doesn't count monitor-boyfriend and Dr. Leekie as company, exactly. Delphine doesn't worry that, in their search - Cosima's and Katja's and Beth's - they let Jennifer slip through the cracks. _Biological imperative_. They'd fallen down on that one, hard.

The first week passes, but that's all right. They've found the source of the polyps, so Cosima counts that as a win. Progress. And they've still got 175 days.

Six months is a long time, because it takes a long time for things to change. She looks in the mirror every morning to fix her hair and put on eyeliner, and she thinks she looks the same. One morning, Cosima twists and turns at all angles - are her cheeks a little more sunken, or is that her imagination? are the shadows around her eyes from stress, or illness? - but then she pushes the thoughts away and heads to the lab, because she's only making herself crazy, thinking that way. It takes a long time to deteriorate like Jennifer did, she reminds herself. A long time to get that pale and thin.

She frowns when she realizes she's running out of eyeliner way faster than she usually does.

Another week goes by. Now there's only two weeks left until the end of April, and then the month is gone. Cosima stares at the calendar on the wall, and the calendar on her phone in a kind of fascination. Two weeks isn't so long. Two weeks is half a month. The last week is only five days. If she rounds - and she does round, this time - then April is almost over.

Five months left.


End file.
